Endless Digital Birthdays – Becoming a Body

I think there’s a neighborhood or damp-in-the-night cobble street in the UK that cranks out clay schizophrenic models that mold and shape into Escher appropriations by Dali. The monstrous “it” blobs seething through closed storefronts while Jekyll and Hyde scream for their lives. The subterranean workshop makes these models with Talking Heads records and sheet metal. The mad scientist behind it all is unclear and is likely an oligarch of calculating influence. Either way, that’s all just noise, and so is this: AHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Endless Digital Birthdays are an art collective stowaway across the bloody pond. They are of sixteen members; Becoming a Body is what we hear of their five-member music department, and what we hear more specifically is a neo-tidal wave of mechanical resistance in the form of sonic club massacre. Some other bands that excite me like this one are Black Midi (a band I never thought I’d find a friend for until now) and Viagra Boys. Becoming a Body is only four songs, clocking at around eighteen minutes, but if it were any longer I might blink blood and have fly-sight. The songs are more like scapes, and they all serve as commentaries on the postmodern. I can’t put the sound into perfect words, so I find it best if you’d just put the sound to your perfect ears and ravage them beautifully.

The first song “V-10” is like early solo Iggy Pop and good Marilyn Manson with drums that take off a landing strip into sideways flight paths and time zones. The second track “Despot Rock (gmrgrlmst)” is a satirical catwalk of German underground porno paparazzi. It sounds like the thoughts of a runway model as he shoots ego into his mainline for Instagram live. Song three is “One Face at a Time,” a track with the most showcase of genre. It starts with a Peter Gunnslinger standoff and breaks off into a piano piece that lifts a dead body towards the light, and the end of song sees the body your soul once occupied dropped from space, catching fire by velocity. The last song, “Luigionair” is the whole of the parts, with some glitzy tongue in cheek bravado, a solid classic rock riff wearing Prada drag, and enough disillusionment to render your ears full of static. The EP ends with electronic noise, making you wonder if you dreamt everything else. The mix of these songs is of the cutting edge as is the entire sound they’ve crafted for themselves. It’s like the score of a Gaspar Noe film about Nazi Germany. With Becoming a Body, you really get a good look at Endless Digital Birthdays’ dystopian today, hoping along with them for a rubble tomorrow.

Endless Digital Birthdays
Becoming a Body
[self-released]